SATA-150 drive in an XPS Gen 2?

[ShnikeJSB]

Hello all.

I currently own an XPS Gen 2. I was under the impression that the Gen 2 supported SATA-150 hard drives, so I purchased a new Hitachi 200GB 7200RPM SATA-150 2.5" hard drive for it. But, upon cloning my old stock 100GB 7200RPM Hitachi, I discovered that it was ATA/IDE with some sort of converter on the end. A converter that isn't the same as the new SATA drive. I could have SWORN they said it supported SATA.

I talked to tech support, and they said the XPS Gen 2 did not support SATA (?!?), and that there was not a converter. They said I would have to use an external USB converter... Which is stupid and completely defeats the purpose of such a fast drive.

Am I stuck with a 200GB expensive paperweight (or an extremely bottlenecked/overpriced external drive)? Has anyone gotten an SATA drive to work in their XPS Gen 2's INTERNALLY? Is there a converter I can buy?

I am a bit peeved...

-JB

 

[Blahman]

All notebooks from before around September '06 use IDE. SATA only began showing up in Inspiron 9300s in a limited test run at the very end of the production cycle, before switching over to the E1705s and XPS M1710s. The "adapter" on the IDE drive is just there to make inserting and removing the drive from the bay easier, protecting the rather delicate pins with a more robust flat lead/plug, it's not an IDE-SATA adapter or anything (I don't think those exist either).

If you didn't already know about it, a much larger and knowledgable notebook community and specifically Dell 17" notebooks is here: http://www.notebookforums.com/forumdisplay.php?f=153